Next week's radio: from Guests Are Like A Fish to Eurovision – Inside Track

Uninvited guests are the great English nightmare, an idea exploited by Shelagh Stephenson in her four-episode comedy of embarrassment Guests Are Like Fish (Friday, 11.30am, R4). The notion here is that the characters played by Haydn Gwynne and Tim McInnerny have moved from London to the rural north-east only to find that the neighbours and relations they blithely invited to come and stay sometime have taken them at their word. Each episode features them steeling themselves to entertain uninvited visitors, who invariably drag along their own domestic problems. The degree of tension to come is heralded by the arcane alcohol brands the guests want to drink and the way the awkward silence is eventually pierced by an enquiry like "Do you get to your mother's grave much?"

You have to feel for comics. They finally get their break on Radio 4 only to broadcast to an audience that has its arms metaphorically folded and, realising that this is a comedy slot, is determined not to find them funny. Cariad Lloyd, star of The Cariad Radio Show (Thursday, 11pm, R4) doubles the risk by making a feature of her own neediness and introducing the first sketch as "not the best one in the show". It works because she keeps up the pace and, whether as Cocktail Sally, Katy Perrier or iMum, has the best thing you can have on radio: an engaging voice.

Nick Stewart, the only music-business insider to have a voice like a character from Le Carré, presents Eurovision – Inside Track (Saturday, 5pm, R2 Eurovision), which talks to the broadcasters and record people for whom this annual show is every bit as important as Glastonbury. Radio 2, in turn, gives the event its own digital station for the day.

Three Continents, Three Generations (Wednesday, 11am, R4) is like an extended real-life version of the 60s Frost Report's "I look down on him" TV sketch. Neil Kanwai, whose family made the journey from India to Kenya and then to England in just three generations, tells the story of the thousands of Indian labourers who were sent to Kenya to build the railway that opened up the country. There they tended to look up to the British and look down on the Kenyans. They lived in their own communities, sent their children to their own schools and built a way of living that was different from the people who were notionally above and below them on the social scale. After Kenyan independence in 1963, they were the victims of the "Kenyanisation of the economy" and so sought to use their British passports to seek refuge in the UK, the country they still regarded as the motherland. The British government was not keen for that to happen. They were, as one voice says, "the Jews of Africa". One of the women who eventually arrived in Britain as part of that migration remembers her shock at seeing white men digging the roads.

When it comes to popular music, authenticity is often the biggest act of all. In Try A Little Tenderness (Tuesday, 11.30am, R4), Salena Godden uncovers the story of Little Miss Cornshucks, a sensation of the so-called "black and tan" showbusiness circuit. Born Mildred Jordan in Dayton, Ohio, she was a great soul singer in the 1940s, before such a style was properly established. Her gimmick was to dress up as young girl from the country in the gingham and pantaloons that the newly citified members of her audience had left behind. They still liked to see it celebrated onstage. Chas & Dave offer a similar service.